Advice for Linda Yaccarino, Twitter's new CEO

“Hello, my friend.” - Linda Yaccarino greets Elon Musk as she enters the final round of the Twitter CEO recruitment process?

On April 18, 2023 Linda Yaccarino, who at the time still worked for NBCUniversal as the head of advertising sales, interviewed her future boss/direct report Elon Musk in front of an audience of advertisers. But while she interviewed him in a talk entitled, “Twitter 2.0: From Conversations to Partnerships”, Elon Musk was evaluating her. It was a CEO job audition, and the audience had no idea that they were the targeted fruits of Yaccarino's labor, ripe for plucking.?

Against a manic animated backdrop that went from blue waves to blaring letters, Yaccarino, in canary yellow suit, and Musk, with his patchy rave-party-in-Cabo whiskers, looked like a couple of exotic fish kibitzing in an aquarium in Times Square. The two laughed together as she lobbed softball questions and gazed at him with fawning eyes.?

Yaccarino never pushed back when Musk—a man who recently caved to Turkish government demands to censor free speech—trumpeted that Twitter is a place where speech is free. She didn't mention how Musk wields his free speech like a hammer, taunting a former employee with muscular dystrophy and citing his pronouns as Prosecute/Fauci. Throughout the interview, she pretended that she was an objective interviewer and not trying to become Elon Musk’s most famous employee. She playfully chided him for tweeting at 3am as if Musk’s only flaw was not realizing that a 3am brain will always tweet from the darkest corners of the id.

“So this is a?good?early step of impact since you arrived at Twitter…”

Yaccarino underscored her boss’s messaging that enhanced controls mean that Twitter is becoming a warm and welcoming place. Not that Twitter wasn’t always warm and welcoming! Disney’s enduring presence on the platform proves that it’s safe for the Mouse. She concluded the interview by reiterating Musk’s key talking points around transparency and trust and imploring the audience to work with him. She even asked everyone to applaud Musk for his efforts.?

Less than a month ago this gesture would have been seen as the enthusiastic blessing of a well-regarded industry veteran. Today it looks like brilliant double-agent marketing and an even more brilliant example of making the boss look good in a critical setting.

If she hadn’t already been hired as Twitter’s CEO before the Musk interview, Linda aced her trial run.

We’ve all heard at least a few bars of the siren song that lured Yaccarino to Twitter. The current job feels stale and predictable—particularly after you’ve just been passed over for a promotion—and the new position juicy and brimming with opportunity. “I could step in and make a real difference!” you say to yourself, ignoring a parade of red flags resembling Workers' Day in Beijing.

A version of this fantasy must be running through the Linda Yaccarino's mind as she ponders her new role as CEO of Twitter. You can bet that Musk has assured Yaccarino, a woman also known as the Velvet Hammer, that she will have the freedom to do her job. But how much freedom will she have to swing her hammer on a platform where Musk still has control over the product? How much freedom will she have when Musk has the power to dial the volume up on his freedom of speech, however hateful or conspiratorial it may be, and dial down the volume on the freedom of speech on the people and organizations he doesn’t like or don’t serve the interests of Tesla and SpaceX?

The good news for Yaccarino, who at 60 is married with two children, is that she doesn’t have to worry about an occupational hazard for any woman in Musk’s orbit: having a baby named after a quadratic equation. And she's not afraid of Musk's hardcore work ethic that she says matches her own.

What advice would you give Linda as she embarks on this new opportunity??

You could say reach out to all the advertisers that you were rehearsing to lure to NBC with your pitch when you took the Twitter job. Just replace “This is Us” with “This is Musk.”?

My advice for Yaccarino is to stop and think. Take out a blank piece of paper and have a conversation with yourself. What do you want to get out of the CEO experience? Are you prepared to go from the country club that's NBC to the frat house that's Twitter? What self-care rituals will you have in place to deal with being the lipstick on the pig of white supremacy, anti-semitism, and authoritarianism??Why do you to want to take on a job that Musk said he'd give to the person foolish enough to take it? How much pain are you willing to endure before you reach your character limit? Is your ambition to be a CEO worth the price you're going to pay? On second thought, maybe you'd rather jump right into your new position without thinking about it too much.

Good luck, Linda. You’re going to need that velvet hammer to play an endless game of whack-a-troll. But you'll never be able to use your hammer on the biggest troll of all.